Thinking While Parenting

Since I officially became an adult, I’m trying to spend more time thinking and less time not thinking (see here). It sounds simple enough, but thinking is nearly impossible in a house that’s being ambushed and taken over by kids.

If ideas are light, parenting is a merciless black hole, the antithesis of thought. There’s always a distraction, a child in distress, an offensive noise or sound, to counteract an idea just as it forms in our mind. Because of its mass and gravitational pull, parenting consumes but doesn’t reflect light.

Living on the event horizon of a black hole is problematic for two reasons. First, life disappears with little to show for it; fewer thoughts produce fewer memories (again, see here). Second, the result of not thinking, day after day, is learned thoughtlessness, a habitual state of unconscious reaction. Unconscious habit is the path of least resistance, one with a deep rut down the center, and we go where it takes us.

The path of default reactions takes us to the Doldrums, a parenting Slump, where the days are dreary and mundane, our kids are noisy and pesky, and the future is bleak. Unconsciously, we end up interpreting our experiences through the lens of self, in terms of our own wants and needs (see This Is Water, by David Foster Wallace). Parenting becomes a drag, a responsibility that we willingly accept, but one that gets in the way.

To break free, we have to realize that we created the black hole. We are the masters of our family universe, at least until our kids turn into teenagers, i.e., klingons. We have to get our acts together and take control of our mind and our inter-stellar situation.

Taking control requires creativity. For example, when the kids plug the sink and flood the bathroom, we can react in one of two ways. The first comes easily and without thought. It is driven by our exasperation at having to clean up another mess. It involves stern looks, harsh tones, and some form of punishment. The second comes with some difficulty and mental effort. It is driven by our desire to make the best of things, and to teach our kids to do the same. It involves instruction on the main functions and capacities of a toilet, and a demonstration of how cleaning up can be fun.

To think while parenting, we have to parent outside the box. When your kids give you a flooded bathroom, make an indoor slip-and-slide.

Recently, my wife went out of town and I had our third-dozen kids to myself for the weekend. One day, our girls tried to make pixie dust, spilling flour, sugar, and food coloring on the kitchen floor and then dancing through it and across the house. The house didn’t float away to never-never land. And I was not Peter Pan. I was Captain Hook.

Next time, I want to be Pan the Man. I want to be positive and make the best of the situation.

Thoughtful parenting leads to a conscious decision to be better, to change, to eliminate the negative and accentuate the positive, to remember how fortunate we are just to be alive, to have these brief moments with the people we love most. It leads to a change in perspective, where instead of focusing on the darkness we focus on our family, brilliant stars, radiating light.